Local SEO Marketing Confusion? Inbound and Outbound Differ

A prior post provided a summary overview of how local SEO marketing is a specialization of Inbound Marketing and how this fundamentally differs from more traditional outbound marketing.

This post describes some common Internet marketing efforts and explains how they do or do not support Inbound Marketing efforts.

Facebook is mostly outbound marketing. Your message is seen only by your Facebook connections (friends) and in spite of what you may think, most of them do not care.

Twitter is mostly outbound, for the same reason that Facebook is.

LinkedIn is mostly outbound, for the same reason that Facebook and Twitter are.

Pinterest is a form of Inbound that makes sense when your product or service has a visual appeal (jewelry, baked goods, bathroom remodels, etc). When using Pinterest effectively, all images should be posted to YOUR website, then pinned within Pinterest (in the spirit of full disclosure, I do not personally use Pinterest).

Blogging is the purest form of Inbound Marketing. When you blog, you must blog on your website under your URL. Using a public blogging platform for your business is like setting up a lemon-aid stand on your neighbors lawn.

Now on to what I personally consider to be the most interesting, which is Google Plus.

Like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc, GooglePlus is outbound status messages sent to people with whom you have direct connections (people who have you in their circles). HOWEVER….. and this is a huge however, GooglePlus status updates are crawled by the Google search engine spiders and sometimes show up very high in search results.